The Romantic Period: Romanticism and Revolution

The Romantic period, spanning from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Reform era of the 1830s was an age of revolutions in multiple registers, on multiple fronts: political, poetical, polemical, cultural. Our course engages some of the excitements in the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas DeQuincey. Our focus is on literary actions, reactions, formations and reforms, and risks and adventures, in the context of the age's ferments: the rights of man, or woman; abolitions polemics; and imagination's innovations.